As more media and real-time traffic are being sent across packet-switched networks, enforcing deterministic throughput and delay characteristics in the network nodes has become a necessity to the future success of such networks. Variations in throughput and delay in a packet-switched network can arise due to numerous factors such as differences in packet processing time, the number of interfering flows, and the type of queuing and scheduling algorithms deployed. These factors are just a few examples, and are not meant to be all-inclusive. While allowing such variations to exist in the network enables higher bandwidth utilization and lowers system cost, the variations are problematic for transporting media and real-time streams. Media streams such as video or music feeds tend to average to a relatively constant bit rate over a given period of time. Typically a media receiver will implement some amounts of buffering, allowing it to tolerate a certain bounded rate and delay jitter during transmission. However, excessive burstiness inevitably leads to overflow or underflow in the receiving buffer. When this happens, the video or music may appear to stop, skip, or be choppy. The discontinuity during a visual or audible experience is unpleasant and unacceptable for human users.